Ugh, I do love clear terminology. But “vibe coding” is so bad it sounds like something a “vibe coder” would come up with! (Joking really. It’s was a funny inve

Ugh, I do love clear terminology. But “vibe coding” is so bad it sounds like something a “vibe coder” would come up with! (Joking really. It’s was a funny inventive and evocative term. The sadness is that it is getting traction as a serious phrase.) Still get fingernails on a chalkboard cringe every time I come across a language model’s “confabulation” (conscious or subconscious filling in of unknown details or facts) being called “hallucinations” (false experiences in sensory systems as they iterate partially or completely unmoored from their normally grounding flow of external information). There are real questions about when anthropomorphizing is appropriate directly or by analogy. But inconsistently applied anthropomorphization is grotesquely unnecessary confusion. As someone who has spent a career being careful with terms, it hurts. Bad terminology and notation create subtle but often permanent drags on clarity. Even poor emphasis does real damage. Tell a three year old a standard circle’s radius is 1 and circumference is called tau. Cool! Tell another 3 year old a standard circumference is 2*pi, perhaps also noting that a half standard sized circle has a radius of 1/2, a diameter of 1, and a circumference of pi to “simplify” things, and see which child more readily takes a conceptual step forward. Because even an extra 2 creates real (transcendental!) conceptual drag.